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Keep doing what you’ve always done and…well, you know the rest.

For my birthday, my husband bought me a new hair dryer-y thingamabobby. It’s called ‘Big Hair’ or something like that, and I love it.

Now, it has essentially only got two buttons. One that turns the dryer bit on and one that turns the spinny bit on. The spinny thing only comes on while you are pressing the button ie when you take your finger off, it stops spinning.

The spinning aspect to the dryer can occasionally be a little problematic. Sometimes, my hair gets caught and it starts trying to yank my hair out. The instructions say to simply remove your finger from the button to stop the spinning, if this hair-yanking scenario transpires, and all will be well.

Sounds easy, right?

No matter how many times it happens, instead of calmly removing my finger from the button, I begin to panic that my hair is stuck while the spinning part of the dryer spins perilously closer and closer to my scalp.

Why don’t I just take my finger off the button?????

I am in complete control of this device. At no time has it done anything contrary to what I am pressing the buttons to make it do.

Which then begs the question…..why do I panic? Why do I not just turn it off? And every time this happens, and I turn it off after panicking and then remembering that I am the one controlling it, I wonder why I can’t just do that straight away. Why is my immediate reaction to panic?

It’s a bit like some circumstances in life, isn’t it? We are in control of a situation, fully able to stop whatever is happening, but we don’t. We panic instead.

As the saying goes, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got. A bit like, if you keep pressing the spinning button, the spinning will keep on going.

Why do we persist as humans to keep repeating behaviour that is harming us, causing us problems and doing us damage?

Why?

The answer to that probably deserves it’s own blog post, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to comb over all my bald spots before the family notices them.

Quick disclaimer: Let me be clear, the Big Hair is great, it’s the user that needs some attention 😛

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We keep doing what we’ve always done … maybe because it’s what we know, what we’re familiar with. We don’t always look at the results. Like looking at your blog posts – the popular ones – and trying to figure out why they were popular. I try to change things up – in my blog, FB posts, tweets – to see what works better, to see what people enjoy more. And keep learning! Just because you are a successful writer, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep working at the craft, learning new things, reading more books and blogs.

Yes, I agree, sometimes we fail to really look at the consequences/results of our behaviour, which means we don’t always stop when we should. I am definitely not saying we shouldn’t keep on learning – quite the opposite. Sometimes we need to stop persisting with behaviour that is not beneficial to us. We should absolutely keep going with things like writing – especially great writers like you!